Friday, June 17, 2016

To Say Nothing of the Dog

Since reading Blackout/All Clear I have been hooked on Connie Willis. I have collected all of her major works to date and have been jealously hoarding them ever since (only reading one of them a year). What's really awesome is that she is still alive...so that means she might write some more, which is great, but I still find myself stingily doling out the love an an annual basis. I mention this because I have dared to begin reading a second one by Connie this same calendar year, and it has me panicking a little!
But today I am talking about To Say Nothing of the Dog. I read this in February, and it was the last of her books written about her Time Travel series. I really hope that she will write more, they are just that good! It won the Hugo and the Locus award.
This book was mainly situated in the Victorian era. As usual, a couple of things go wrong for the historians visiting there and the protagonist Ned Henry is sent to fix things up. Unfortunately for Ned, he has been time travelling a lot recently and he is suffering from 'time lag'. After being shoved in to the time net, he has forgotten half of his damage control instructions, thus making the mission go 'pear-shaped' in a comically tragic way.
The main things I love about these stories is that I learn a lot of history (and it's all very interesting), there are a lot of literary references (which I love to follow up on... this time I bought the Kindle bundle of Jerome K. Jerome's complete works), and there are lots of unforgettable characters. When things go wrong it's all very engrossing, exciting, and best of all gets me chuckling throughout the read, greedily gobbling up pages of the story to the very end.
What is also nice, I suppose, is that even though you have finished the book, there are lots of things to look up and read about, so it helps to keep me busy and not think too much about there not being another book in the series.